Professor Laleh Khalili

Department Politics and International Studies, SOAS University of London

Laleh Khalili has a bachelor of science in chemical engineering (University of Texas 1991) and a doctorate in political science (Columbia University 2004). Before attending graduate school she worked as a “summer engineer” and a management consultant in the United States.

Khalili is the author of Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration (Cambridge 2007) and Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (Stanford 2013), the editor of Modern Arab Politics (Routledge 2008) and co-editor (with Jillian Schwedler) of Policing and Prisons in the Middle East: Formations of Coercion (Hurst/Oxford 2010).

For the last five years she has been researching the politics, geopolitics and geoeconomics of maritime transport, logistics, and infrastructures in the Arabian Peninsula in the 20th century. Her project, including this website, is funded by ESRC grant number ES/L002833/1.

She is currently in the process of writing Sinews of War and Trade about the politics of shipping (under contract with Verso and project for publication in 2019). She also plans to write a complementary historical account of maritime transport infrastructures in the Peninsula, tentatively titled Quartermaster of Capital.